Technical Solutions to Social Problems

"You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem." - Edwards' Law

"Every time I hear Edwards' Law, I reach for my gun" - the Noisebridge Secretaribot

There are lots of fascinating challenges to running a hackerspace using the purest anarchist collective principles, many of which we appear (from the outside) to talk about endlessly. Some of them are actually *about* the need to talk endlessly.

We brainstorm and implement new software, hardware, and architecture that can support Noisebridge's unique social contract in the same way that almost all of the rest of our culture works to support _its_ definition of normality.

Meeting 2012-02-09

So social engineering this evening concentrated on trying to define the problem
we've been discussing on nb-discuss these past few aeons, listed the
challenges, listed the aspects of Noisebridge we wanted to preserve, and then
went through the classes of proposed solutions, and how much we liked them.

What was the winner? The proposal we liked the most was putting into place a
keycode system (probably Kelly's hot-tub matrix), but not losing the key and
the buzzer for now -- and indeed a general encouragement to create as many
interesting ways of getting into the place as possible. Once we see how those
go as a temporary plan and see what the uptake is, the goal would be to turn
off the buzzer, but that would only be after more discussion and
experimentation.

I'll pass over to Kelly who I think is going to lead this as a spun-off project.

I'm not around for soceng next week, so feel free to use that meeting for this,
though I think it's big enough to spin out on its own.

Previous meeting archive

Meeting on 2011-12-13

Meeting on 2011-12-06

Just me and Kaya, so I worked on getting the gate buzzer to work.

Meeting on 2011-11-29

We talked about the shop walls, and what worked and what didn't. In the end, it turned out to be more of a planning session for the next stage: Miloh planned to work with others on finishing up the classrooms (mudding + putting primer on it) so the electrics can go in next.

We brainstormed the needs for the issue tracker (or basically the things that online tools might be able to help with in the space). We also listed stuff that was and working with the wiki and mailing list.

What Works

The Wiki works fairly well in the following ways:

generic repository for information

a historical archive

something with a reasonably low barrier to entry

Desires

Triage and priorisation of issues and tasks.

"Rolling consensus" (Miloh's term) outside of the meeting.

To stop projects going stale

Store institutional knowledge

Create recurring todos

Easy process for creating new prjects

A point of contact for events/projects

Defining long term projects

"Impending doom" highlighting -- fire safety, that the sink is going to fall off the walls at some point, earthquake prep

Anticipating crises (maybe the same as above)

Keeping noise off noisebridge-discuss

Broadcasting to all our users

Linking the online world to the realworld space, and vice versa

Fundraising

Encouraging new members

Growing Noisebridge

Providing an online identity for members

Getting input from the space

Meeting on 2011-11-16

Will talked about the cleaning experiment, and this was moved to the meeting.

We talked about soundproofing the shops and classes, and decided to do it Thanksgiving weekend

We talked about the next six months of soceng, and decided to concentrate on one project, to whit a karma and issue tracker for Noisebridge written in Ruby on Rails.